Transforming Church

What the Church desperately needs today is a new paradigm for congregational faithfulness. Most congregations today succumb to the self-centered and self-inspired ideal of being a friendly family. "Majority rules," exercised at congregational meetings, encourages personal priorities. In stark contrast, biblical directives identify that a Christ-centered sense of mission needs to replace "the friendly family" ideal.

The path of collective discipleship in a congregation is no different than that of individual, personal discipleship. Individually or collectively, the problem is that the Church has unwittingly sold millions of church members a bill of goods with cheap grace. Wanting so much to help people appreciate that God’s Grace is free, which should never be questioned, we end up selling short the importance of our response to God. In our eagerness to reach everyone we have painted an all-too-easy relationship with Jesus. We should be truly and forever grateful that Jesus is our whipping boy, someone to take our punishment for us, but in our relationship with Him it is disastrous to cast Him solely in that role

Nevertheless, for millions there is at best a grateful acknowledgment of only that role. True, for many there is also identification with becoming a follower of Jesus, but the difference that identification brings to their lives is marginal. Often there is no behavioral difference between so-identified followers of Jesus and non-believers. Becoming a faithful member of the congregation often receives more attention, but even that has become marginalized.

What we should be concentrating on is growing in our relationship with Jesus, becoming a servant disciple. Instead we become distracted by Constitutions and the principles of Robert’s Rules of Order, all of which direct our concern to personal preferences within the institution. We end up selling out to what is warm and fuzzy, and meanwhile our relationship with Jesus becomes more and more obscure. Discipleship has essentially been denied for centuries. The masses today think that becoming a church member and a follower of Jesus is the whole magilla.

Any relationship with Jesus that does not cost us, any relationship with Jesus that does not challenge us every day of our life, sells short that relationship. If the marriage relationship between a husband and wife requires hard work to both sustain the relationship and have it become fulfilling and meaningful, should we expect anything less individually or corporately of our relationship with Jesus? The Church today is in dire need of letting go of personal priorities and embracing anew the priorities with which God started the Church. For that to happen a congregation must become spiritual in its DNA, extremely attentive to such as prayer and study of the scriptures, and daily renew its trust in the Holy Spirit to lead. Each congregation must set aside personal and corporate preferences so the Holy Spirit can take the reins of ministry.

Also being tested here is God's unbelievable patience as He waits for us to fulfill the mission He has given us to reach others so they can realize His grace. The way most of the church is going today, we have been reduced to simply future generations of our own families, waiting for more European immigrants to arrive, or for their descendents to move to our town. This is a disastrous compromise of our purpose. At best we annually add a few tens of members instead of being the kingdom multipliers we are called to be.

The Chaordic Age, among other labels, helps identify our time. Apart from those persisting in naivety, we have moved beyond illusions of being able to straighten out the mess we’ve made of creation by simply trying harder. This life is never going to get better and better. Like the Holy Spirit, the Church must learn to move within the fringe between chaos and order and engage the challenges of ministry there. This is not the path of least resistance.

What is needed is to take the direction and responsibility for ministry out of our hands and return it to the Holy Spirit. The starting point for congregational faithfulness and missional vitality is first and foremost a matter of vision and passion gifted by the Spirit. In other words, real transformation can happen only when members willingly and corporately lay down their personal preferences, along with their penchant for the path of least resistance, and follow the Holy Spirit’s leading and direction.

Just as individuals daily renew their baptism through confession and forgiveness, setting aside their own egos, so also must a congregation set aside its corporate preferences to be renewed in its mission and vision as a team of disciples. Congregations that are not yet on this path can be found pretty much anywhere. Just because other well-meaning congregations want to jump off the bridge, or in this case "off the path of walking in mission with Jesus," does not make it right to compromise Christ's Church by turning it into a Sunday morning God Club.

Long overdue in MOST congregations is an intentional move from modern to postmodern, from member and volunteer-based ministry to disciple-based ministry, from the path of least resistance to meeting the real and immediate spiritual, physical and emotional needs of people. Although Matthew, chapter 28, has called congregations to this mission for almost two thousand years, the vast majority of congregations today desperately need to become re-identified with it. Any other path will lead congregations to languish and decline.

What is being suggested here is that a most needed transformation of the Church today replaces our reliance on self-management and self-evaluation, that it be replaced with a sincere spiritual system. We need to abandon being a church that seeks a majority voting on preferences, to become a church that seeks prayerful discernment of the path the Holy Spirit has for us.

Do not make the assumption that Jesus is obviously at the center of your congregation. When Jesus increasingly does become the center rather than the membership, the Holy Spirit is released to work His own transformation. The result is that the direction of decline in the congregation is turned around to the vitality and growth of God's purpose.